I've decided to commit to a hard drive install of KIARA, but not an ordinary hard drive install. By copying KIARA to a partition preformatted with the DOS FAT32 filesystem (the same as most flash drives) and using the bootinst.sh script (instead of liloinst.sh) to make the system bootable, I've replicated a live CD or flash drive install on my hard drive. This combines the security of a live CD with the speed and performance of a hard drive install.
I keep my data and my settings by mounting an ext3 partition as /home, and recreating the same normal user account with each new reboot. There's a simple shell script in /root (the home directory when you're in root) that I use to facilitate the setup process. The script is named normal, and it looks like this:
mount /dev/sda3 /home
adduser qwerty
passwd root
visudo
/dev/sda/ is the partition that's mounted as /home
qwerty is the name of the regular user.
Running the script saves me a little work, but mostly it guides me through some basic commands, so I don't have to think too hard about what to do, and I don't forget anything. Anyone who uses this script may have to edit it to mount the correct partition, and to choose a different user name.
I'm going to break down this whole process (partitioning, installing, configuring) into horrible horrible detail elsewhere. The real point of this post is to simply announce that I'm now running KIARA full time, and that has repercussions for the future of my obscure little distro. If the trend continues, there will be additional software ported from Slackware 12.2 and available for download and install, and that may lead to a live DVD.
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